The Female Stand-Up Comedian and The Blow Job

Blow Job Routines That Blow Minds: Stand-up Comedian Zahra Barri discusses when female stand up comedians talk about blow jobs on stage and celebrates Jacqueline Novak's Special GET ON YOUR KNEES

Basing your entire career on a blow job? No, that’s not a mean punchline about Monica Lewinsky said by some un-woke bloke on SNL in the nineties, I’m talking about Jacqueline Novak’s one-woman stand-up comedy show GET ON YOUR KNEES on Netflix, which is based entirely on making comedy out of the bane of every straight woman’s life: THE BLOW JOB.

But first let’s take a look at the history of female stand up comedy and her relationship with the Blow job joke that she has in in her arsenal…

The Blow Job Joke: A Peek Through History

Every female stand-up comedian has one. Some mouth it quite softly, subtly, sweetly with only a mere suggestion of it, complete with a bewitchingly saintly twinkle in their eyes. Such innocence seems to suggest an almost virginius stance, a high pitched, “Who, me?” Never done it but here’s my guileless take on it kind of vibe. Perhaps even in the voice of a young Joanna Lumley while dressed like Zooey Deschanel. Just a little nibble of an innuendo, a peppering, a peck of double entendre, a minuscule bite, so the word lies just on the very tip of her tongue, only ever getting as far as lip syncing the initial: “B.J”, she says ever so seductive. And by doing so she makes the punchline more titillating pun than dismaying dishevelment of sexual dignity. Maybe she makes a nod towards going blind from the dénouement of the act- such splattering’s, inducing flashbacks of her family paintballing trips or Ant and Dec’s infamous Byker Grove episode, optimising the word play which she leans into with theatrical gusto:

“Now, that’s what I call a BJ and Duncan” she utters into the phallic mic.

The Politicisation of the Blow Job

Or perhaps, instead of referencing a storyline in a forgotten nineties CBBC show that happened over twenty years ago and thus alienates both GenZ and Boomers, she chooses to politicise her blow job joke and again draws attention to its’ initials being parallel to our floppy haired ex-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Adding this level of political agenda onto the blow job joke seems to cancel out the smut. As if cultural intelligentsia makes the female comic in question less of a joke slut booked only for stag dos and more suitable to a Guardian interview. Or at the very least a liberal open mic night in Dalston where the promotor asks for your pronouns before you go on stage and makes you sign a waiver that you won’t make fun of gay people, the disabled or Muslims even though half your family are Muslim, gay and disabled. But it’s true, intellectualising your blow job joke gets you far more work. After I managed to conflate fellatio with feminism, I achieved the impossible and began to appeal to what I call both ‘the woke and the bloke’. As a result, I filled my diary with both of these sorts of gigs. Theatres full of liberals who clap and cheer as well as stag do’s who laugh and leer.  

But perhaps the female comics that I think are doing the best blow job jokes on the circuit are the ones with no political agenda and that are outrightly, explicitly brazen rather than whimsically bashful with their blow job joke. Maybe, that’s why I prefer female comics who turn the blow job joke, into not a mere ‘joke’ but more of a ‘bit’. Or even a full on ‘routine’ that leads to a climactic explosion of laughter so hard, that the female comic needs to take a drink of water that she has dextrously put by her side for such a moment, and which she sips sweetly as she readjusts her dress while she waits for her audience to quieten and to settle. These sort of blow job jokes, sorry routines are to me, what enters feminism into not another wave but another dimension. They don’t just smash the glass ceiling they penetrate the outer layer between earth and space known as the Karmin Line, and enter us into a hemisphere where we don’t feel the gravity of our sex. Where finally, every woman’s dream has been realised, for she is weightless.

The Blow Job Joke on Viagra

Whether its Amy Schumer’s tale of her ex-boyfriend yawning while she went down on him or Nikki Glaser’s story of the first time, she found out what a blow job was and how this day in a girl’s life should always be as far away as possible from the day she actually gives a blow job. These routines last so long it’s the equivalent of the bashful female comedian’s blow job joke on Viagra. Such comics are outright saluting to the gods of the humble blow job joke. Its my favourite part of analysis of any female comedian’s set, the way she plays with sexual controversy and/or taboo. Simply put, does she just flirt or fully put herself out?

Alas, whether she plays nicely or more naughtily, my point of this essay is that every female comedian worth her salt has a blow job joke in her wheelhouse, complete with jokes about bikini waxes, Tinder and HPV. However, they say comedy is all about timing and so it goes without saying that the moment a female comic chooses to wack out her blow job joke is integral to how it goes down.

Timing of the Blow Job Joke

 Depending on the brazenness to bashful ratio of her blow job joke, directly relates to the frequency in which she gives it. Knowing when to bring it out, involves a complex comedy equation. Yes, Tragedy plus Time = Comedy but Time + Comedy + Throwing in a Blow Job Joke could very equal Tragedy if you are not astute about it. One has to read the room, one has to forgive me, use their head in order to talk about giving head. The Mary Whitehouse School of Comedy back in yesteryear strictly advised young female comics that the blow job joke was to be kept for only very special gigs. One was not to use their blow job joke when merely doing a Tuesday night gig in a village in the arse end of nowhere to mostly old Boomers who think edgy comedy is sending a meme to their family WhatsApp group of Jim Macdonald from Corrie’s blooper reel. Using it there would be the equivalent of using the nuclear codes, at best you’re going to bomb so hard and cause complete devastation at worse deathly silence in which only the cockroaches of comedy survive in the form of a bumbling and thumbling promotor whose name has been mentioned more times than Taylor Swift at the Grammy’s in the female comedians #Metoo WhatsApp group.  

Deciding whether to drop the blow job bomb is an exact science. She bangs it out only when doing a twenty-minute routine and only when she is at least three quarters through and only when it is on a rowdy Saturday night where most of the audience have been intoxicating themselves with booze for at least the last two hours. Please note if the blow job material is merely a bashful joke/pun akin to the aforementioned BJ and Duncan tag and/or an acerbic take on the current political situation vis-à-vis the symbolism of the blow job e.g. “we’re all just eating dicks now the Tories are here”, one can also apply this to the liberal arts gig.  However, if she is a true legend and doing a full-on brazen blow job routine, one must only do it three quarters into a twenty-minute set to a drunken debauched Saturday night crowd.

Now GET ON YOUR KNEES

The great thing I’ve found to be true about the blow job routine is that it becomes a tester for her to gage the room for other riskier subject matters. If they like the blow job joke, she can pass go and collect £200 and do her abortion and sexual assault jokes. But all these rules around the blow job joke have since been proved futile upon watching Jaqueline Novak’s Netflix special who based an ENTIRE SHOW around the blow job. It was quite simply: mind blowing. Whilst she had astute bits on how the penis was actually very feminine thus adding a feminist and non-binary slant, she did something even more ground-breaking than politicizing the blow job joke, she somehow managed to desexualise the blow job joke. Not only through her meandering monologue but aesthetically, Novak is deliberately not sexy. I hate to be one of those donkeys and talk about what Novak is wearing on stage, but her plain jeans and baggy t-shirt scraped back hair and no makeup seems to be making such a statement: that she is not there to titillate. Novak not only desexualised the blow job; she deconstructed it so that in many ways you forgot that she was basing her entire set around the phallic act but instead she managed to encapsulate an entire world view onto the premise of a blow job. Basing an entire show around the concept of a blow job? Nikki Glaser’s based an entire show around sex jokes which, back in 2016, was and still is equally ground-breaking. Glaser, who will always be one of my greatest influences in that she talks unashamedly about sex and breaking down taboos, but whilst she based an entire special around sex and Novak based her own around the blow job, what is revolutionary about Novak, is that she made me see the blow job as less of a job and more of a wizard like quest, bringing the blow job into almost magical realism genres. Not only did she do so, thus desexualising and deconstructing the blow job joke, she neither politicised nor antagonised an agenda on to the crowd. Refreshingly the Netflix Special is full of actual laughter not clapter. Novak’s Get on Your Knees, in its’ essence is simply doing what all great art does, making us see old, rather banal (yes guys the BJ is bloody boring) things in new ways.  And yet at the same time she is doing what I personally applaud any artist who does, daring to talk about the taboo, candidly not bashfully, not when the audience are drunk enough, but brazenly and bravely for the entirety of the show, from foreplay to finish.

I have a blow job joke in my Muslim Feminist novel, you can order it here Daughters of the Nile

You can watch my stand up comedy routine about BJ’s here Zahra's Blow Job Routine and/or watch me talk about Lady Chatterley’s Lover below.